Pop music has become louder, less original: study finds

July 26, 2012

Fans cheer during the EXIT festival in Novi Sad in 2011. Your mother was right: Pop music has become louder and less original over the years.

Your mother was right: Pop music has become louder and less original over the years.

At least, this is the conclusion of a computer analysis of nearly half-a-million songs recorded between 1955 and 2010 and reported in Nature Scientific Reports Thursday.

"We have been able to show how the global loudness level of music recordings has consistently increased over the years," study author Joan Serra of the Spanish National Research Council said in an email exchange.

Similarly, the team found the diversity of chords and melodies has "consistently diminished in the last 50 years".

"This yields a clear recipe for contemporising old songs: using more common chord changes, changing the song's instrumentation, and record it louder," said Serra.

The study spanned a variety of genres, including rock, pop, hip hop, metal and electronic.

It mentioned no songs by name, simply analysing the music in algorithms of numbers and symbols in search of patterns.

"Much of the gathered evidence points towards an important degree of conventionalism, in the sense of blockage or no-evolution, in the creation and production of contemporary Western popular music," said the study.

So close and yet so wrong - you might love heavy metal like Metallica but your music platform suggests you should also like the Sixties sound of The Doors, simply because both bands are classified as rock.

Most people remember listening to the official UK top 40 singles chart and watching the countdown on Top of the Pops, but can science work out which songs are more likely to 'make it' in the chart? New research has looked ...

Popular music videos have been criticized as having misogynistic messages and images. While more female music artists have gained visibility and created successful "brands" in recent years, critics argue that many of these ...

Tiny Anolis lizards preserved since the Miocene in amber are giving scientists a true appreciation of the meaning of community stability. Dating back some 15 to 20 million years, close comparison of these exquisitely preserved ...

(Phys.org)—It was an interesting week for physics as a team made up of international researchers came up with a new theory that says dark matter acts like a well-known particle—they suggest it has similarities to pions, ...

The Tyrannosaurus rex and its fellow theropod dinosaurs that rampage across the screen in movies like Jurassic World were successful predators partly due to a unique, deeply serrated tooth structure that allowed them to easily ...

The first human inhabitants of the Americas lived in a time thousands of years before the first written records, and the story of their transcontinental migration is the subject of ongoing debate and active research. A study ...

Very interesting indeed. I think part of the problem is a lot of recent pop songs are also now being designed by algorithms. Artists like Lady Gaga write their own music but with the aid of certain algorithms which have had success in creating popular music but this of course is going to lead to more repetitive music.

Is there a link to the original study anywhere or a reference. First of all I am just curious second of all I think it is honest to give some credit.

SatanLover

What the study hasn't taken into account is the diversification of the 'pop' genre over recent decades to encompass all manner of new musics that simply fly under the radar of the 'commercial pop' banner - especially the various forms of dance music - a full list of which would be beyond the scope of a forum post, but which represents a much larger swathe of actually-popular music than the ever-declining commercial 'pop' of yore...

Moreover, modern technologies have engendered new and innovative sounds and chord sequences etc. that would only arise rarely if at all in more conventional pop - if anything we've got more creative, not less...

While there were obviously 'underground' scenes in times gone by, they represented a far smaller section of listeners than today, hence the study isn't a like-for-like comparison...

This yields a clear recipe for contemporising old songs: using more common chord changes, changing the song's instrumentation, and record it louder

While results like this are interesting you can count the seconds until it will be snatched up by some music executive and put into practice. Music has (since the advent of the boy band knock-offs in the 1980's) been designed largely by committee for commercial success and not for the artistic value.

Heck, the long-time band of a friend of mine split up last year because the singer and lead guitarrist plainly stated that they wanted to make money and that there was none in the 'progressive rock' they were playing. They now play "Volksmusik" (which is qualitatively the german equivalent to "country and western" in the US. Something you can clap along to.).

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.